


Interlude (Contact)

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [7]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Conversations, Gen, Workplace, casual touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 09:35:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4095982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder and Scully touched each other frequently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude (Contact)

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: Season One, post-Tooms  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

They touched each other. They touched each other a lot. When she stepped through a doorway, there was Mulder behind her, his palm at the small of her back. She sat close to him at the light box, shoulder pressed against shoulder as they pored over the details of the images. He cupped her elbow briefly as she faced down a taller, broader, more senior agent with a skeptical twist to his lips. She brushed his arm with her fingertips as she left to do another autopsy, abandoning him to a room of sneering peers. He leaned in, heedless of the cordon she'd grown accustomed to drawing around herself, and she didn't move away. 

She couldn't remember feeling so easy around anyone else. Instant intimacy: just add Mulder. Funny with his tragic childhood that he should be so open-hearted. There were thoughts they sheltered from each other, but their bodies spoke a common tongue. He shifted from foot to foot and she read him as plainly as newsprint. From the minute arch of her eyebrow, he took his cue. She walked in the shelter of his body and he stooped to murmur in her ear.

"You and Mulder seem close," said someone she'd known in the Academy (months ago, years ago, sometime before her precipitous descent). 

"Close?" she said, startled out of medical reverie. Complex molecules danced before her eyes. "He's my partner."

"Dana, he practically keeps you in his pocket." Someone else, an acquaintance in the little knot of agents.

"I think you're exaggerating," she said stiffly. "He just had a theory to share and he knows how little his work is respected these days."

"Not everything can be attributed to little green men," said someone else. 

_Grey_ , Scully wanted to say, but held her tongue. "If you don't need our input on this case, I'm sure there are other leads we could follow."

A head shake, a sigh. "All right. If you want to be Mrs. Spooky."

"It isn't like that," Scully said, a little too loudly. 

(It wasn't like that, but it wasn't not like that. She had walked into the basement and it was the end of her life, and the beginning of it, and she knew from the line of his back as he stood flipping through a file at the other end of the room that it was the same for him. He let her face her own accusers. Were Mister Spooky to ride to her rescue, it would only give credence to the rumors.

Some things defied explanation. That was the first thing she'd learned, working with Mulder.)

"He's my partner," she said again. "He's just a little intense, that's all."

"Just a little." Knowing chuckles from the agents. They all moved on, back to the business of solving crimes.

Mulder glanced up at her from his file folder. She met his eyes briefly. _It's all right._ He nodded very slightly. 

She joined him in his corner a few minutes later. He was pinching his lower lip between his finger and thumb, a sure sign he was working on something.

"Mulder?" she said. "What have you got?"

"What if…?" he began, and they were off on their familiar route from mystery to truth, Scully making him prove himself at each checkpoint. 

They solved the case, she and Mulder, fitting the puzzle pieces of her expertise and his intuition together into a seamless portrait of the crime and the criminal. The other agents stood by smirking as Mulder presented their perspective, the smiles slowly fading as Scully shored up his points with her science.

"At least one of you is down to earth," said the agent in charge, already turning away. The rest of the agents drifted away in ones and twos, murmuring to each other.

"Sorry," he said as they walked down the hall. He pressed the button for the elevator.

"What for, Mulder?" She crossed her arms. 

He made an abrupt gesture with one hand, and then shoved it into his pocket. "I know you spend half your time running public relations every time they call us up for help on a case."

"I didn't join the Bureau with the idea there wouldn't be any politics," she said, stepping into the elevator. He leaned against the back wall. She was acutely aware of the distance between them, and acutely aware that it didn't matter a bit. They were entangled on the quantum level; what affected one affected the other. 

"I think you got assigned to back a dark horse," he said. 

"I vaguely recall that the horses with the best win records get the heaviest handicaps," she said. "It doesn't matter to me what they think, Mulder. I'm here to work."

"Yeah," he said, shifting to one hip.

(She had told Ellen he was cute. That wasn't the whole story. Even Tolstoy would struggle to capture Mulder in words. He was handsome and infuriating. He was brilliant and obtuse. He read porn in the office and bellowed joy to the heavens when the world moved in mysterious ways. She had rescued him from a base fenced off by razor wire and he had burst through her door to help her fight Tooms. Mulder stood alone against the world and she stood with him, moved by the echoing solitude in him and his ceaseless effort to illuminate the shadowy evils perpetrated by nightmares. It didn't matter if they came at a case from different angles. She believed in the method if not in the madness. She had faith in Mulder and she had faith in herself.)

"You're my partner," she told him, and it meant the same thing as it had when she'd said it to the others, and something else entirely.

"Yeah," he said again, not meeting her eyes.

"Hey," she said, reaching out to brush his forearm with her fingertips. "Mulder. It's fine."

He lifted his head and gazed at her. She looked back steadily. Mulder, more social than she, was frustrated. The ranks were closed against them and might always be. It was easier, she saw, to face the scorn he'd courted than the dismissive way they treated her. He had played the fool to achieve something for himself and now they painted her into the same corner. She was spooky by association, married to the work by the old men on the upper floors. The crease in his brow held regret for the choice he felt she hadn't had. 

"You don't deserve this, Scully," he said.

She patted his arm. "They'll like us when we win."

Mulder gave her a lopsided smile. His forehead smoothed slightly.

"All right, they won't," she said as their floor dinged. "But we'll know."

"I'll start a scrapbook," he said, and escorted her out of the elevator with his hand gentle behind her shoulder.


End file.
